A view of Blackness from both sides of the border: Debra Thompson’s ‘Long Road Home’

Debra Thompson, an academic at McGill University, spent 10 years working in the United States. After growing up in Canada, she thought the U.S. would feel like a homecoming of sorts — it is, after all, where her roots were, from where her grandfather’s grandfather, Cornelius Thompson, fled to find freedom in Canada. But often, they were the only Black family in town. Thompson’s journey is detailed in her new book “The Long Road Home.” The Star spoke to her about what she found.

This book is very much memoir. Why investigate ideas of belonging this way — you’re an academic after all.

I’ve always thought of it as being much more a social critique in which I use my life as a window into bigger questions about belonging and race and democracy and inequality. I’m actually deeply, deeply uncomfortable with how personal this book is. But after being a teacher for decades, my sense is that it’s hard to understand social structures and norms and ideas and these lofty concepts. I started doing presentations of the material long before I knew it would be a book and people were really captivated by the stories I was telling.

Your family has been in Canada for generations. One would think that kind of historical rootedness would make a country feel like home. But it didn’t. Why not?

There’s two things I tried to do in the book. One was to explain how desperate I was as a younger person to answer that question “Where are you really from?” with “I’m from here. I’ve been here, my family has been here, we’ve earned our place, how dare you assume we’re not part of the social fabric.” And, second, to think more critically about what that means … the amount of time your family has been in the country as a litmus test for one’s belonging in this country. If we really believe in the equal moral worth of every human being, then it doesn’t matter if you’re first generation or third generation. It’s part of this logic of settler colonialism that’s really problematic … without acknowledging, of course, that there had been Indigenous presence in Canada and the U.S. since time immemorial.

In researching anti-Black racism in Canada you note there’s not much written about it. How did that hamper your feeling of belonging?

It’s hard. I teach courses on race politics at McGill. And one of the constant themes of my classes is to say, here’s the evidence we have on this phenomenon in the U.S. And here’s what we know about Canada. The research is so thin. I think we in Canada tend to assume that structural systemic institutional racism will be exactly the same as … in the U.S. And that’s not the case. We have different institutions, a different political structure. There are nuances and peculiarities and specificities to the way anti-Black racism works in this country that really deserve critical, evidence-based, social scientific inquiry. But it’s hard to research what is so consistently jettisoned from the realm of possibility. Canadians cannot fathom that our country is racist.

We look south of the border at American slavery and the terrible Black experience. How has that allowed Canadians to be complacent about our history?

Built into Canadian political culture and national identity is this inherent need to compare ourselves to the U.S. The way that that plays out, more often than not, is that being Canadian is often being not American. There’s a racial logic that’s implicated there. Because we believe that “real” racism exists in the U.S. … that’s where slavery was, where Jim Crow segregation was. And so if we believe that we are not American and America is where the real racism is, ergo, Canada and Canadians can’t possibly be racist. It’s that logic of deniability that really permeates so much of our political and social discourse.

We have the idea of Canada being the end of the Underground Railroad and being a haven where people fled to, to get away from the horrible things going on in the U.S.

In the book, I talked about what the Black studies scholar Katherine McKittrick calls the absence and presence of Black Canada. At the same time that Canada imagines Black people as being not from here or being new arrivals, the mythology of Canada as this white saviour from American slavery also depends on the existence of a Black Canada. My dad’s family, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, they all lived and died … in Shrewsbury (Ont.). That place was home to them. But it was also hard: my grandfather ended up working as a train porter — he was denied many jobs because white people didn’t hire Black people. There was rampant segregation in public and private spheres … all of the things we look to the U.S. and shake our head and clutch our pearls. Those same social phenomena existed and continue to exist here. And they are not American transplants: they are born and bred in this country, just like me.

There’s a striking quote from your father, who said to you that “You’re looking for ghosts. You’re looking for evidence left behind by people who are trying to hide, and whose lives depended on how well and for how long they could do that.”

There’s a really interesting body of literature on what we call the Black archive. It’s the idea that, in government archives and museums and other ways that we are taught to officially remember, Black life is not likely to show up in part because Black people often try to avoid the state. You don’t want to … have an encounter with a bureaucrat, or the police, or an immigration agent, because those agents of the state are frequently agents of racial terror. So we often have to look in other places: we have to look to folklore and tall tales, and oral histories and jokes, the songs we sing. And oftentimes, that rubs up against what we think of as being valid, reliable evidence in historical inquiry.

You lived in the U.S. for 10 years, in four very vastly different places (Boston; Athens, Ohio; Eugene, Oregon; and Chicago). That allowed you to look at the nuance between Canada and the U.S., but also within the U.S. What did you see?

I moved to the U.S. when Obama was president, went on the job market just after Obama was elected. People were like, “We don’t need to hire you, racism is over.” And then, we see the rise of the Tea Party, we see Black Lives Matter emerge … And Donald Trump is elected. And then COVID in 2020. And then, of course, George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis Police Department and people were calling it a racial reckoning. It seems much more like a pattern to me. I can’t remember if it’s Mark Twain who said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” It was a wild decade. One of the things that happened in that decade is a real shift in race politics in some ways. It was a very similar pattern, as we’ve seen throughout all of American history: racial progress that’s then shadowed by this incredible disproportionate backlash where that progress is then eradicated.

You write that you began this book in a moment of sheer potential. And now it’s a moment of backlash.

More people know now about police defunding and prison abolition than ever before. Those terms were not in the public lexicon 10 years ago. But if you actually look at, for example, police budgets, they have increased everywhere. Black Lives Matter has had some successes. But if you look at the companies that signed the BlackNorth initiatives, how many of them have actually met their goals? It’s hard to sustain that kind of pressure and outrage, and these types of demands always end up getting co-opted, diluted, turned into a marketing campaign and a way for people to make money rather than do justice. It’s not just the failure of the demands, it’s the indifference toward anti-Black racism on the part of most of the public.

There is, especially here in Quebec, a real anger around the idea of “woke-ism.” In the U.S., we see it like a deliberate attack on critical race theory. I am skeptical and yet, we will look back and it will still be an important moment in the history of our time. It just we’re not in the same moment.

When you come back here after those 10 years, you write that you “fled” back here. That seems such a clear echo back to the Underground Railroad and fleeing America.

When I decided to move back to Canada (the beginning of winter 2018), the political climate in the States wasn’t great. Trump was going to win a second election. (I maintain had COVID not hit, he would have won.) I was really worried about the Supreme Court and increasingly regressive policies were about to be entrenched in American political institutions for the next generation. I just couldn’t fathom raising my children in that environment. But, at the same time, I call it fleeing because it wasn’t uncomplicated. I was sad to leave. I was so grateful to have access to the Black community. And when I moved there, I felt like I was going home. The United States was built by my kin, my ancestors, and they didn’t even get American citizenship.

But your children were born there and you have citizenship now.

(I thought) I will collect something that my ancestors didn’t get, even after they were exploited and broken for generations.

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